Handicapping candidates to lead FERC

Well before Jon Wellinghoff officially announced his plans to resign as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last month, the Beltway rumor mill was at work churning over who would be named his successor.

And while President Barack Obama has several strong candidates to pick from for the chairmanship, there is a potential snag.

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Nominations for FERC commissioners, like other independent agencies, go a lot more smoothly when nominees can be arranged in bipartisan packages. But the next Republican commissioner won’t come up for renewal for two years.

It’s not unusual for a commissioner’s five-year term to be renewed a year early in order to pair it with a nominee from the other party, although two years is a bit of a stretch. Theoretically, a Democratic FERC commissioner could be paired with a Republican nominee of a different agency.

That may make a moderate candidate preferable, especially after Wellinghoff’s outspoken support for renewables. And any new FERC chief will have to catch up on the agency’s 2011 transmission planning order, oversee the integration of new natural gas supplies to the nation’s energy mix and be capable of policing the volatile energy markets.

There’s also a desire to keep the five-member FERC leadership regionally diverse because energy markets, natural resources and utility infrastructure vary across the country.

At the moment, the Northeast, Midwest and Northwest are represented, and Wellinghoff’s departure will create a hole in Southwest representation. Geographic diversity isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but it adds a nice touch.

Because FERC is a nonpartisan, technical regulator, a vacancy there is not likely to receive the attention of the open Cabinet-level jobs at the Environmental Protection Agency and the departments of Labor and Commerce, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy — just ask Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairwoman Allison Macfarlane, whose slow reapproval is being held up by Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, who has sought documents about a nuclear issue.

Here are a few people who are likely to top the list of FERC candidates:

Ron Binz

Binz’s name has been making the rounds recently. The former Colorado Public Utilities Commission chairman is a big proponent of renewable energy and is seen as someone who would continue promoting policies already set in motion by Wellinghoff. He briefly chaired a climate policy task force for the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, and he’s a consumer advocate.

Binz is senior policy adviser at the Colorado State University-based Center for the New Energy Economy, which is run by the state’s former Democratic governor, Bill Ritter. After his four-year chairmanship of the Colorado PUC ended in 2011, Binz returned to Public Policy Consulting focused on energy and telecommunications regulations.

Binz didn’t win any any friends in the state’s coal industry, though, since he helped craft a law that incentivized the closure of some of the state’s coal-fired power plants. Toward the end of his tenure at the public utilities commission, he was the target of a former Republican state senator, who filed an ethics complaint against him for accepting a travel reimbursement from an energy analysis firm that invited him to speak about natural gas in Houston. Ultimately, an independent ethics commission ruled he “did not breach the public trust for personal gain” for having his hotel and airfare paid for.